I work at a record store where we just installed windows xp on one of our networked computers. we had been running windows ME on a four-year-old computer from gateway, but decided it was time to get rid of millenium edition because it was extremely unreliable.
anyways, when we installed xp most of our software became unstable—excel took 5 minutes to load, many programs gave us a “not responding” message, and our scanner just plain stoppped working.
bear in mind, all we did was run a clean install of xp and installed office xp and a couple other small programs. the computer had next to nothing on it’s hard-drive, so it should have been running beautifully. we also DID NOT update xp—no service packs–nothing.
after pointlessly defragmenting the newly-cleaned hard disc we decided that we probably needed a new BIOS set-up. we downloaded an updated BIOS from gateway and attempted to install it, but our floppy drive did not work! so we attempted to make a bootable CD to load BIOS but had no success. at this point we gave up troubleshooting and our REAL problem started…
while running “spybot” just for the hell of it (even though spyware shouldn’t have been on the computer), the computer froze, an error message appeared saying our NVIDIA driver was invalid (or something strange like that) and we attempted to reboot.
Now NOTHING boots. no windows, no BIOS no nothing. the hard drive clicks once or twice and stops. no images on the screen NOTHING. no loading, nothing at all. the CD-ROM will still open and close, the PC still obviously has power, the moniter is on of course, but nothing happens.
did we wipe out BIOS? did we blow out the motherboard somehow? is the hard drive dead?
any suggestions?
thanks.